Dean Nelson is the Telegraph Media Group's South Asia editor. He has been based in New Delhi for four years. He is @DelhiDean on Twitter.

The Pakistan Malt Whisky Society

Pakistan is a rum place to go for a drink, and yet for the determined dram-lover exiled on the Indian sub-continent, it is the only place for decent whisky. It’s a hard one to fathom. India has plenty of distilleries, many of them older than some in Scotland, yet its whiskies are undrinkable frauds – distilled molasses, untainted by malted barley, funny rum at best.

Vijay Mallya’s McDowell single malt is as good as it gets: just five year old, insipid, and serves only as a reminder that you need a break: When you find yourself saying "mmm, not bad, actually," you know it’s time to call the travel agent.

On the other hand, you could cross the Wagah border to Pakistan where the Bhandari family produce the excellent Murree 12 year old Special Reserve. I was introduced to it by the late Minoo Bhandari, the Parsi former minorities minister under dictator General Zia ul-Haq. We met in Delhi where he was preparing to launch his 18 year old malt, and I thought it would make a fun feature: A country where drinking is an offence
for the overwhelming majority having the nerve to think it could produce a single malt.

Minoo had smuggled out a few tasting bottles, and poured the drams in his room at Delhi’s India International Centre as he explained how Scotch whisky experts had told him to forget his plans to produce a single malt in the 1960s: You need Scotland’s water, they told him.

I was wondering how I’d hide it if, as likely, it was revolting. No need though, and we had another two. What amazed me was that it tasted, to my palette, almost identical to Lochside, a flowery seaside whisky from a long-closed distillery in Montrose.

My brother had bought me a bottle as a gift some years earlier, and it shared its floral flavour with a whisky produced from grimy Rawalpindi’s groundwater. You wouldn’t want to drink Pindi’s water before it has been to the centre of the earth and back, so the idea that it might produce a passable whisky is extraordinary. Minoo hadn’t tasted Lochside, but suggested the similarities could be because of the saltiness of the water: Rawalpindi’s water is drawn through a salt pan.

This week, the UN’s delayed report on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto took me to Islamabad, but not before a quick stop off in Lahore to visit Faridkot House, a graveyard of government files where foreigners must register their weakness and infidel faith before excise officers to get the prized permit you need to buy alcohol.

It opens the door to the grubby underworld of Pakistan’s "permit rooms", hidden basement warehouses, usually tucked away at the back of chain hotels and teeming with Christian dealers who control its distribution. Sadly, its export is banned from Muslim Pakistan, so a guaranteed source of foreign currency remains a hidden gem, a pleasure reserved for those prepared to cross the border, drink tea with excise officials and wait for them to break out the sealing press.

Right now, it’s in my suitcase, and the long and gruelling journey back across the Wagah border is made a little more bearable by the thought that it’ll be in my glass by sundown.